RICK OWENS: awesome, awesome, awesome.

Until this week, fashion designer Rick Owens
was mostly known for creating gothic, grunge-inspired clothes that
wouldn’t look out of place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But thanks
to his Spring 2014 show at Paris Fashion Week, he’s now famous for
introducing one of the most diverse and rebellious runway shows in
recent memory.

Even if you make every effort to ignore the mainstream fashion
industry, you’ll still have a fairly accurate mental image of what
“models” are supposed to look like: tall, thin, expressionless... and
usually white. This Thursday, Rick Owens broke the mold by employing a mostly African American cast of college step-dancers (a combination of cheerleading and military drill) to “walk” his new collection down the runway.

Compared to the size zero, predominantly white models of most
womenswear shows, it was a shocking display of diversity. Not to mention
a lot livelier than your run-of-the-mill fashion show where models
calmly walk in a line from one end of the room to the other. [READ MORE]